Twitter has acquired Quill, a company that TechCrunch described as “a business-focused messaging service meant to compete against the likes of Slack and keep people, well, more focused”.
Quill put a blog post on their website titled: “Twitter + Quill”.
We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. We believe the tools we use to communicate today are not the best they can be. Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal – to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone.
According to the blog post, Quill will be shutting down, “but its spirit and ideas will continue on.” People who currently use Quill will be able to export their team message history until Saturday, December 11th, 2021, 1PM PST. Quill will be turning off its servers and deleting data at that time.
Also on December 7, 2021, Nick Caldwell @nickcald (GM for Core Tech at Twitter) tweeted: “Excited to share today that we’re welcoming @QuillChat to Twitter!” This was the start of a short thread.
TechCrunch reported: Quill is not making the cut in the acquisition: it will be winding down as an app, spokesperson from Twitter said. TechCrunch also pointed out that Quill will issue refunds for all active teams. The team from Quill will be joining Twitter’s Experience organization to work on messaging tools, specifically Twitter direct messages.
I never used Quill, and had not heard of it before. On the one hand, maybe it is good for the Quill team to be acquired by Twitter. Perhaps Twitter, being a very large company, will be able to pay the team well and give them the proper benefits.
On the other hand, I always find it troubling when a big corporation purchases a smaller company. It makes me concerned that the ultimate goal of the big company is to make a fancy announcement and then fire the newly added team. It appears that Quill was trying to be a competitor to Slack, which gave people the option to use Quill instead of Slack. And now, Quill belongs to Twitter.